more offense than pitching?

[aleitel]

60/40?
70/30?


and can benitez actually be an effective closer since he is so cheap?

[geekor]

You want roughly 50H/30P split in a normal 80 mil league. Of course this needs to be adjusted sometime if you are playing in extreme stadiums.

Benitez is not, maybe in Petco/Kaufman, but anywhere else he is death.

In the FAQ read about the ballpark ratings and look at Bentiez's card and see all those #, which are HR's in HR parks.

[worrierking]

There was a long discussion in a thread from the 2005 season called "the Secret Formula" in which a series of items were noted by some veteran players about championship teams. One of the features of many championship teams was the amount that they spent on hitters/starters/relievers. The ratio was approximately 48 million on offense, 18 million on starting pitchers and 14 million on the bullpen.

This was a rough average, but when put into practice, quite a few players had success staying within these general ranges.

The "Secret Formula" has not been quite as successful a strategy in the 2006 game, but it does give you a starting point to consider. If you are new, I wouldn't stray too far away from these numbers. Don't go overboard and obsessively look for perfection in the numbers at the expense of other more important items like you home park or designing a team to contend with the others within your division, but this is a useful starting point.

here's a link to that thread from last August:

http://forums-beta.sportingnews.com/viewtopic.php?p=23031&highlight=secret+formula